Think about someone on your team right now.
Not your highest performer. Not the one whose name comes up in every talent conversation. Think about the one who shows up, does the work, holds things together quietly — the one you’d genuinely miss if they left, even if you’ve never quite said that out loud.
Now ask yourself: could you describe, in specific terms, what they actually bring? Not their job description. Not their output metrics. What they bring — the particular way they think, the instinct they have that nobody else on the team has, the thing they do that makes the whole enterprise work a little better than it would without them?
If that answer comes slowly, you’re not failing as a leader. You’re experiencing something structural. Organizations are built to measure what’s visible — tasks completed, targets hit, problems escalated or resolved. The quieter forms of capability, the ones that don’t show up on a dashboard, tend to stay invisible by default. Not because they don’t matter. Because no one built a system to see them.
That’s the problem worth sitting with.
Vanessa Druskat, in her book The Emotionally Intelligent Team, draws on the social neuroscience of Matthew Lieberman to make a point that sounds simple until you feel the weight of it: our need to belong isn’t a preference. It’s biological. The same brain systems that process physical pain process social exclusion. Our need for genuine acceptance and mutual support within groups isn’t separate from our performance at work — it shapes our motivation, our behavior, and whether we bring our full capability to bear or hold some of it back.
Druskat’s research found something that should stop leaders cold: many of us unknowingly establish norms that work against belonging — not out of malice, but in the name of efficiency. We prioritize the direct exchange of information and tasks. We move fast. We measure outputs. And in doing so, we create environments where a significant portion of what our people actually have to offer never gets seen, never gets named, and never gets used.
Here’s what that costs: organizations hemorrhage capability not because people leave angry, but because people leave unseen.
The nurse who has a gift for patient communication that goes unremarked. The program coordinator who architectures entire conference experiences and receives no development investment in return. The teacher with a genuine philosophy about how children learn, who keeps showing up despite an environment that has no vocabulary for what she brings. These aren’t edge cases. They’re in every organization. They’re probably on your team.
And here’s the part that matters most: most of them aren’t plotting their exit yet. They’re still there. Still showing up. The window is open.
Druskat also notes something worth naming directly: leaders often miss the belonging piece because they already feel like they belong. When you’re in the room where decisions get made, when your name is known, when your contribution is visible — it’s genuinely hard to see the experience of someone for whom none of those things are true. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a gap in perspective that deliberate attention can close.
So what does deliberate attention actually look like?
It looks like a conversation that isn’t about performance. Not “how are you tracking against your goals” but “what part of this work do you find yourself thinking about when you’re not here?” It looks like noticing the thing someone does that no one else does and saying it out loud to them — not in a review, just on a Tuesday. It looks like asking, genuinely, what they’d want to do more of if the opportunity existed.
None of this requires a new system. It doesn’t require a talent review overhaul or a belonging initiative or a budget line. It requires slowing down long enough to look at the people already in front of you with the same intentionality you’d bring to any other leadership challenge.
The capability is there. It’s been there. It’s waiting to be seen.
Think of one person on your team right now whose full contribution you couldn’t describe if someone asked. That’s where this starts. Not next quarter. Tomorrow.
Reference: Vanessa Urch Druskat, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform the Rest (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). Druskat draws on Matthew Lieberman’s social neuroscience research, including his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Crown, 2013).
Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash